When Melanie Shave and her Kiwi partner Adam Maddox began searching for their dream home, they embarked on what they called ‘playing house roulette’. The stakes were high and it was a race between Auckland and Vancouver.
The couple had met a decade earlier, at LA International Airport, when Adam asked Canadian Melanie if she was enjoying her book. Now, the couple had a newborn baby and were trying to buy a house in Vancouver. But after a trip home to New Zealand to see Adam’s family, they weren’t sure where they wanted to live and decided to extend their search to both countries.
“We’d find a house in Vancouver, unsuccessfully bid on it and be discouraged, then do the same with a house in Auckland,” says Melanie.
After missing out on six houses, they made a wish-list of their requirements for a move to New Zealand. It included a character house for Melanie in a location not too far from Auckland, in close proximity to a surf beach for Adam, a big garden for kids to run around and a good local school.
Home Profile
Meet & Greet: Melanie Shave (graphic designer), her partner Adam Maddox (software entrepreneur), their sons, London, 12, and Silas, nine, three Arapawa sheep and two guinea pigs.
The Property: A renovated villa/bungalow on a 2.4ha section at Muriwai, Auckland.
The scales tipped in favour of Auckland when Adam found a property online that ticked all the boxes: a rural four-bedroom, century-old villa with two hectares of protected native bush, just six minutes’ drive from Muriwai Beach and close to a local school.
“He sent me a photo of it with the front door open with a view of the Tasman Sea, and I said, ‘That’s it’,” says Melanie.
Adam’s parents visited the property that night and Melanie and Adam won the house at the auction the following day. It would be perfectly normal to have some doubts after purchasing a house halfway across the world without visiting it yourself, but Melanie says they only felt excitement.
“We were renting a two-bedroom apartment with no yard back in Vancouver and couldn’t wait for the new experience.”
But when the couple found out they were expecting baby number two, they decided it would be easier to stay in Canada until after he was born. A year later, Melanie and Adam arrived in Auckland with three-year-old London, three-month-old Silas and a suitcase full of curtains and bed linen from IKEA.
Making it theirs
After waiting so long to see their home, Melanie says it was an emotional and surreal experience to finally walk through it. While she was keen to retain many of the original features, it required some work to make it liveable for the young family.
They removed the original scrim and sarking, relined the walls, insulated, plastered and painted, reroofed the house and garage and polished the floors, doing as much as they could themselves.
Apart from wanting to honour the history of the house, Melanie, who is a graphic designer, says that initially she didn’t have a very clear vision for the design of the interior, so she picked a neutral white paint, Dulux Mt Aspiring Half, as a base palette for the walls and used that as her starting point for the rest of the interiors.
Thanks to the 3.6m-high ceilings and large windows with views of the sea, sky and hills, the home is light enough to carry darker colours. Melanie opted for moody grey tones, painting some of the walls, including the anaglypta paintable wallpaper in the living room, in Dulux Castlecliff, a cosy charcoal colour.
This custom colour also features in the murals Melanie painted in the boys’ bedrooms. One features a Gotham cityscape, while the other depicts Vancouver’s three local mountains as a reminder of their Canadian roots.
Doing the time warp
Uncovering the history of the house has been one of the most compelling aspects of restoring the home. Melanie found out that it was originally situated in St Stephen’s Ave in Auckland’s inner-city suburb of Parnell before it was relocated to Muriwai in the 1990s. Several renovations throughout the last century have led to it having some unique features.
Although it was originally built as a double-bay villa around 1914, a bay window with leadlights and a square porch was added to the front of the house in the ‘20s and ’30s when Californian bungalows were in vogue. Unusually though, it appears that the wooden lace, which would have originally featured on the villa, was added to the bungalow-style porch, making it somewhat of a villa-bungalow hybrid.
“The house is a combination of styles and every era adds its touch,” says Melanie.
Something old, something new
Arriving without any furniture meant starting from scratch when it came to furnishing the house. They purchased a mix of new and second-hand furniture in keeping with the grey and white colour scheme.
“Rather than buying things that are trending, I chose items that fit in with the house,” says Melanie.
“I spent a lot of time scouring.”
A historic feature they reintroduced to the living room was an antique fireplace, which they bought on Trade Me. The original fireplaces and chimneys had been removed from the home in the 1990s. Melanie wanted to create a focal point above the fireplace with a French-style mirror and decided to make it herself. She purchased a large mirror with a black plastic frame, spraypainted the frame gold, then aged it with dirt-grey paint and plaster.
Cooking up the kitchen
The biggest project was renovating the kitchen. Melanie had her heart set on a traditional handmade kitchen.
“I wanted it to feel like it belonged to the house and approached a few kitchen companies,” she says, “but they kept offering us the same modern design.”
Unable to find what she wanted, she put the kitchen renovation on hold and went back to school to complete a diploma in interior design. This gave her the skills to redesign the space, including a combined mudroom and pantry with cabinets and an oak rolling ladder. She took inspiration from a clover detail in the wooden lace on the front of the house and included it in the cabinet door.
Great outdoors
Melanie says that one of the biggest learning curves for the family has been learning to live on a lifestyle block and getting used to aspects of rural life like relying on tank water. When the family moved in, the paddocks surrounding the house were terraced in grass and had an old, broken swimming pool.
“Adam had a vision for the land and wanted an infinity view,” says Melanie.
“Robot lawnmowers weren’t affordable at the time, but he landscaped with a wheelbarrow and shovel, planning that one day we’d have a robot lawnmower that could cut the grass.”
Melanie says it was a mud pit for years until a kind neighbour turned up with a digger and helped Adam contour the section. The grass grew and Adam now has his robot lawnmower, but the boys’ three pet Arapawa sheep, Owlet, Catboy and Gekko (named after characters in the children’s TV series PJ Masks), also help to keep the grass down.
Home away from home
The family has now moved to East Auckland to be closer to Adam’s parents and so the kids can go to the same school as their cousins, but they visit any chance they can get, during weekends and holidays. Now that the boys are older, they’re able to explore the native bush on the property themselves. Muriwai is renowned for its dark skies and views of the Milky Way, and sometimes on clear evenings, the family takes their telescope outside to stargaze from the back deck.
“When we bought the property, Adam’s dad kept saying, ‘It’s magic, it’s magic, you’ll see’, but I didn’t really know what he meant until we came here,” says Melanie.
“I don’t think you can get this lifestyle anywhere else in the world, where you’re so close to the city and by such a beautiful surf beach that’s so wild and rugged and also have this country lifestyle. It really is like nowhere else.”
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- Inside a light-filled bungalow renovation on Auckland’s city fringe
